The garden grows, the house gets a bathroom.

Our days as tree planters and fabric layers are over, making way for some intense house and garden work. 

Earlier in the month we had ordered 800 pounds of compost and by now we were just itching to mix it into the garden's soil. By the wheelbarrow load we scooped earthy black crumbles and spread the nutrients around tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, peas, and corn alike. The sun and rain has been good to the plants and most everything has just erupted in size, providing us with more salad greens, radishes, and peas than we know what to do with! 

One morning's harvest

Corn and red salad bowl lettuce being companions. The corn provides shade for the lettuce and prevents it from bolting.

Three green tomatoes were spotted one morning!  Connor started this plant from seed in January.

Our favorite mix (from bottom to top): zinnia's, marigolds, tomatoes, a pepper, a broccoli, amish deer tongue lettuce, and nasturtiums. A true collage. 

Pea plant climbing: all of our trellises were made from reclaimed/repurposed wood.

Pretty proud of our garden space

Our home was looking a little lost and lonely, so we rolled flashing (a sticky, tar-like substance) around the windows and door and nailed fascia under the drip edge with 1x8's. Two of our windows hadn't been installed yet because we had acquired them without a nailing flange, so we ordered one long strip to attach to the vinyl windows ourselves. A couple of minutes into comparing the nailing fin to the window, trying different positions and ways to possibly connect the two, left us no closer to installing the windows than before. Feeling way in over our heads, we solved the problem by boarding up the bathroom rough opening.
With the bathroom window gone we realized we had stumbled onto some new possibilities. The ceiling could be build lower than 8 feet to provide storage space on top, and we could have a window in front of the sink. We built the bathroom walls and door opening in an afternoon, planning to use an old bathroom door from the Fischer house. We are very fortunate in that all of our windows and doors were either free or very cheap. There was some debate over what kind of plumbing and toilet system to have, and we've decided to build a simple composting toilet that we'll be able to mix with our outdoor compost system. More on this when we tackle that project - we are working on wiring the place and no telling how long it'll take to figure that out! Peace and love, friends.

Connor nails the bathroom wall to a stud, with our boarded up window behind him.

Bathroom!

Our kitchen space

Floppy, Big Mama, and Sauron chomping on weeds. We love them all equally.

And our beloved and attention needy Aussie.

And some crazy South Dakota weather patterns

"As soils are depleted, human health, vitality, and intelligence go with them."
Louis Bromfield

Wrapped, windowed, and doored

A visit from the Ault’s!

One rare sunny Saturday my parents and sister Emily rolled into the driveway of our homestead for a weekend stay and to help out with our garden and tiny home. We let our chickens out of the coop and allowed our little old Shetland sheepdog, Belle, roam amongst them to see what she made of these new creatures. The chickens paid zero notice until her herding instincts kicked into gear and she started rounding them up.  My dad and Connor made quick work of cutting the remaining window openings with a skill saw while my mom, Emily, and I took shovels in hand to mound and till summer garden beds.

The rest of the weekend was on and off rain but the days were far from wasted. In between bursts of rain, my dad, Connor and I ran out to the tiny home with our notched roof rafters to test their spacing. When the rain became too much we played games inside and watched the world soak up the shower.

Cutting out window openings with skill saw

Photo cred. Emily 

Bill finds his calling in construction:)

Photo cred. Emily (just love the tree in the window)

Photo cred. Emily

Emily with the chickens

Mounding and tilling summer garden beds

Belle decides she likes chickens

Planting Our Forest

The conservation district had an annual tree sale in an attempt to clear the cooler of remaining trees.  We couldn’t resist.  We purchased 350 trees.   These trees will be used to restore the cabin’s existing shelterbelt and to establish more wind protection around the cabin itself.  We designed a six-row shelterbelt with layers of shrubs, medium trees, and large trees. Each species was picked based on form, color, drought tolerance, usefulness, and most of all wildlife habitats.  We will plant the trees individually with a soil augur.  Claire and Connor’s Forest: Common Lilac, Elderberry, Caragana, Buffaloberry, Eastern Red Cedar, Black Hills Spruce, Crabapple, Bur Oak, Hackberry, Little Leaf Linden, Black Walnut, and Highbush Cranberry.   

Memorial Day Weekend

My Aunt Sara and Aunt Amy visited on Memorial Day weekend, along with Izzy, Robby, and of course, the dogs.  Saturday was overcast and breezy so we all worked in the garden raising the last four beds.  It is a complete and total relief to finally have our garden beds and grid trail system finished.  Popcorn, sweet corn, sunflowers, bush beans, runner beans, marigolds, potatoes, and cucumbers were seeded into the soil.  The rest of the weekend was rainy and cold but many a games had been brought to compensate.  On Sunday we did laundry in town at a friend of Sara’s!  We watched television, took showers, and simply relaxed.  

Connor and Rob and Layla

Laying Fabric

The Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, Claire and I planted our last tree for the Clark Conservation District.  We had planted 18 shelterbelts throughout the county, totaling to 65 acres and thousands of trees. These shelterbelts will act as wind and snow breaks, sound barriers, and eventually good deer habitat (and hunting). The next step was to lay a fabric weed barrier over each row of trees.  We removed the planter from the tractor and replaced it with the fabric-laying machine.  An 80-pound roll of fabric attaches to the “layer” and as the tractor moves forward, the fabric rolls onto the field and over the trees.  One of us sat on the “layer” and sprayed a dot of paint on the fabric every time it rolled over a tree, while another followed behind the equipment with a utility knife and cut out every tree and a third stapled the fabric every couple of feet. It was truly back breaking work. However the fabric allows the trees to be free of competition and weeds while they become established over the next couple of years, and it will eventually decompose into the earth.

The fabric took us two weeks to lay, and now our job for the conservation district is coming to a close. We have a couple of hand-plants to do for some landowners, but then we can (finally!) focus entirely on our home projects.

Power auger

Hand planting trees in a two-year old shelterbelt

Gardening 

The five beds that make up the spring garden are green and growing.  Kale, spinach, lettuce, and arugula will be ready for picking in a couple weeks.  The peas are climbing towards their trellis and the carrots are just poking through the soil.  Feeling high on our spring garden success and the nice weather, we planted three of the summer beds with our best tomato, pepper, and broccoli transplants, along with nasturtium, beans, many herbs, and cucumbers. We learned a hard lesson a couple of days later when we were hit by strong, cold winds that whipped and shredded our new, utterly unprotected seedlings. Most of our tomatoes, peppers, and broccoli plants withered away into nothing on top of the soil, along with our hard work in raising them all winter.  We’d been incredibly stupid in thinking they could thrive exposed to the elements, but none of our gardening books stressed wind protection and we forgot all about our harsh prairie gales. We took the liberty of bringing home some of the thick cardboard rolls from work, cut them up and placed them around the surviving transplants.   Thankfully we still have plenty pepper and tomato seedlings in the garage, waiting for a calm spring day.

The problem with having more seeds than we know what to do with is that we are now planting every available space along the perimeter of the fence with potatoes, flowers, extra beans, and watermelon!

Potato spuds line the fence

Peas beginning to climb their trellis

Kale!

Carrots in between radishes

Cucumbers in hills

We are proud of our corn

Bush beans

One ravaged but surviving pepper

Radish!

Power House Weekend

For the first time in four weeks, we had a beautiful weekend without rain.  We took advantage of the weather and invited John and Maureen to come help us put up the rafters and shingles on our tiny home roof.  With scaffolding erected outside and inside the house, Connor and I nailed rafters one after the other, almost as fast as John was cutting them. The rafters gave the one room home a defined sense of space, and curiously made the whole area seem larger than before. Next was the roof sheathing, just one layer of OSB particleboard nailed to the rafters, and then a heavy duty strip of ice guard around the edges. The ice guard prevents ice from building up underneath the shingles.  Thick roofing felt was laid in rows in the center of the roof, and with that we were ready to shingle! Two layers on the bottom and the rest overlapping all the way up the roof in a simple pattern, we worked until it was to dark to see the nails we needed to hammer in. Upon reaching the top of the roof slant, we realized why most roofs have a peak. The peak allows water to run off on both sides of the roof without trickling beneath the shingles, but our roof design leaves the shingle edges exposed on the highest point of the roof.

It took all four of us to roll out the 9-foot tall Typar building paper and staple it to the exterior walls. Connor and I carried out windows one by one and with extreme trepidation lifted them into their rough opening slots. There was room to spare around each one where we wriggled in a couple shims, leveled the whole window, and nailed the flange to the studs. Our most expensive $25 window was the only one that gave us trouble with a warped flange (irony?) but a couple hours later Boom! Three windows and one door were proudly decorating our wrapped walls.

Connor and I spent many days discussing our off-the-grid pursuit – the dream, the difficulties, the money, and the future uses of our tiny home – and we made the decision to forgo this aspiration temporarily. We realized that living off the grid here and now would mean more survival than living. We don’t have and couldn’t afford solar powered technology right now, and that would mean candles and lanterns, few options for keeping food cold, and no way to charge phones or laptops for communication. But the biggest reason to run electricity through the house is due to the fact that we’ll be traveling with this home to who knows where, and the option of hooking the house up to an available electrical source can only be made now, before we install interior walls. One day we dream of true off grid living (and earthships and goats and month-long backpacking...) but for now we're taking one project at a time.

Building scaffolding

Nailing the roof sheathing

House!

Laying shingles into the night

Stapling building paper

Wrapped, windowed, and doored!

Is That a Tiny Home on the Horizon?

Spring proves once again to be the busiest time of year for budding trees, flocks of birds, insects, and us! With the weather warming we worked long hours with the conservation district planting as many trees as we could, then came home to dig up a little more sod in the yard before finally falling into bed. Bit by bit we chopped and rolled the thick layer of grass until half of our 120 square feet was a beautiful dark earth. We tilled the entire area by shovel, overturning large chunks of earth then chopping them into crumbs. We created 15x3 foot mounds with trench walkways between. The mounds we smoothed into flat beds with a rake and carefully transplanted some of our kale, spinach, and swiss chard seedlings. They looked so tiny out in the big world. The rest of the space we seeded with onion sets, arugula, endive, carrots, radishes, peas, and the two rhubarb bulbs we’d gotten from the conservation district. Our current lack of rain and constant winds dried the soil within an hour of watering, so we raked up dead grasses and straw from the field to cover the beds and walkways. Some mornings we came out to find the water in the hose had frozen overnight, and we fretted that we’d planted too soon. The concrete between the forms of the storm shelter hardened and one day we pulled out the inside walls, but other than that projects on the home front were slow or at a standstill.

On the job: loading trees onto the planter

Two people drop tree seedlings into the trench, the third walks behind and straightens tree/ packs earth

Yard transformation
 

Creating mounds and walkways

Connor’s parents returned two weekends later and we continued work on the storm shelter. While Connor and John built the roof and door forms of the shelter, Maureen and I labored further on the garden, mowing the lawn for mulch, digging a perimeter walkway, and finishing the seeding. Connor and I had been scrambling to put all of the cool weather plants into the soil and it was a relief to finally have this done. When the roof and door forms were in place and supported with bracing, I bent the rebar rods to lie perpendicular and the four of us tied a grid of rebar over the whole roof. Without the rebar the concrete has no strength, and a heavy load over the roof might collapse it. Maureen and I used our ratio skills to mix concrete while John and Connor poured, and thankfully this time there were no surprises! John smoothed the surface and a few days later after everything had hardened, Connor and I stripped the forms.

        

Bracing the roof form

Adding walkways and grass mulch to beds

Plywood roof and door form in place...

Rebar grid across roof 

Removing all the forms

 In winter when snow still covered the ground, we had a chat with some friends in town about the ravenous rabbits and deer that will devour a garden if given a chance.  Since that conversation, Claire and I have been set on surrounding our 120 square foot garden with a six-foot tall fence.  Originally, we planned to drive metal poles into the ground and string galvanized steel to each.  That idea, however, proved to be too expensive and we decided to make our garden fence out of wood.  Eight-foot 2X3”s served as our fence posts and chicken wire as our barrier between a green garden and hungry animals.    During my parents latest visit, I dug 19, two-foot holes with a posthole digger around the garden.  Claire and I then placed one 2X3” per hole, used a level to make sure the post was plumb, and filled roughly 75 percent with rock and the remaining 25 percent with topsoil.  We started with the four corners and worked our way to the centers, following a taught string as a guide.  Once all 19 posts were erect, we used 2X2’s (ripped 2X4’s) to connect each post to one another.  Each board was placed four feet above the ground in order to act as an area for the chicken wire to attach too.  My Dad spent about 20 minutes whipping up an awesome door for the fence while the rest of us stapled chicken wire to the posts. Finally, our garden has become a prominent feature, the beds are no longer accidentally stepped on, and it is (mostly) safe and secure from our furry friends.

Connor digs post holes against a blue sky and john deer

Fence is up and chicken wire attached (to the bottom half) 

After three long weeks of no rain, planting trees for the conservation district became a regular event, sometimes working more than 50 hours in five days.  Finally, on the Thursday before we were expecting visitors, it rained!  Small and large rain drops created a symphony of sounds on our tin roof, rivers of runoff rushed back into our slough, and our garden was content with no extra watering (so were we).  Although the rain was exciting, we had planned on erecting the walls of our tiny home that weekend with my brother Mati and friend Phil.  Too much rain and our work site would become dangerously slippery.  Too much wind and our walls would blow away before they were secured.  Saturday morning, however, was partly sunny and mid-50's.  Perfect.  The four of us began by attaching the sub-floor (5/8th plywood) to the floor frame.  It was a good practice round considering the heap of nails that would have to be hammered into the exterior walls.  Next, we hauled all four wall frames to the building site and started with the back 16-foot wall.  Three of us erected the wall while the fourth used a level to ensure the wall was plumb.  Once it was declared plumb, two people screwed in 2X4" bracing while the others held the wall in place.  Once the bracing was attached, we all pounded 16d nails into the sole plate, officially securing our first wall to the floor.  On and on we went, raising wall after wall, bracing each, and securing each to the floor.  Finally, our house took shape.  We could walk in and our of our door and pretend we were seeing the finished product.  However, these fantasy did not last long, for the exterior sheeting (1/2 particle board) would need to be attached before dark.  Unfortunately, wind, and rain came sooner than night.  With haste we attached all the exterior sheeting and bolted inside the cabin just before getting soaked.  The winds and rains pelted against the unfinished home all evening and night, giving us uneasy sleep, but in the morning it there it was, proudly soaked but still standing! The remainder of the weekend stormed and rained so we had to stop the building there.  Thank you Mati and Phil, we could not have completed so much in just one day without you.  

Floor joists with bridging

Plywood subfloor

Our first wall plumbed and braced

Hanging out

Nailing particle board sheathing to exterior

Connor and Mati nail on the top plate

Back window cut out with sawzall

The tiny home spent several days looking boxy and cube-ish until one sunny day we headed back out to finish nailing the outside sheathing and cut out the door and windows. The heavy sawzall, a small saw that vibrates back and forth, gave us quite a bit of grief in the beginning and we clipped many window sills and trim. The neat part about the whole thing is that now when Connor and I drive down residential streets, we can recognize the different roof patterns, materials, and techniques that we've read or learned about as we undergo this project. The size of a dormer or length of a gable overhang has never been so interesting. With two windows and the door cut out, we can begin to see what living in this small space will be like. The rain has slowed our work again, and our tiny home waits for nicer weather to be worked on.

Storm on the prairie